After too long, I write
to answer your unspoken question.
If you were here, we’d go
for coffee and pie and end up
getting too loud, no doubt,
laughing in an all-night diner
as we did when Nixon
taped himself into a corner
after mutilating the Plain of Jars.
Today, huge grateful drops
are falling, so I’ll go out
on the porch and take in a scent
driven from rocks and mud,
molecules exploding into the air.
I’ll inhale and drift back
to the slow work of hope
as though I’ve figured it out,
as though the earth itself
hasn’t demanded it.
Michael Lauchlan’s most recent collection is Trumbull Ave. (Wayne State University Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Ninth Letter, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere.
